Win 7 vs. Win8.1 and MSN homepage

[Mike H]

Win7 vs. Win8.1 and MSN.com

My 88 year old mom’s XP computer finally had enough. Bought her a simple HP 110-210PC 64 bit with Win8.1 already loaded (she has bad arthritis and has trouble working the mouse, thought I could migrate her over to a touch screen eventually). Here are the problems I have with the MSN home page in the desktop version of IE.

1. IE is very very slow.
2. The MSN page stops responding.
3. There are ads on the right side of the page that I want to get rid of and DO NOT have on my machine (detail below).
4. I cannot actually go to www.msn.com even though I have put it in as the home page on the General tab of Internet Options. I end up at something like 13HP.us.msn.com.
5. The Internet Options and About Internet Explorer option under tools are sometimes grayed out and therefore not available.

The machine I use and am comparing to is an old HP Pavilion 64bit with Win 7 Ultimate. My version of IE is 11.0.9600.17105IS – update version 11.0.7(KB2964358) Product ID: 00150-20000-00003-AA459. While I currently do not know the exact version on the newer machine I do know that it is IE 11. Also, both machines have IE 11 set to update IE automatically (the update automatically box is checked in the about IE dialog box from the tools drop down) so I am ASSUMING we have very similar versions.

What I have I done?

1. Updated all I could update.
2. Switched to the classic view.
3. Disabled all accelerators and add-ons (which did help with the speed).
4. Uninstalled HP Simple Pass because the task manager was showing it to be hogging 50+% of the CPU when IE was very very slow (this also helped with the speed).

What else can be done to improve this experience? Compared to my old 64 bit HP pavilion with Win 7 Ultimate these issues are extremely annoying.

Thanks in advance for your support

Mike

 

[Mike H]

Partly solved

After much forum perusing here and at the HP forums I compared this file in both machines:

C:/windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts

In my win7 machine I had more than 1000 entries that started with 127.0.0.1 that had been placed there by JV Power Tools, a 3rd party registry cleaner and general defunkafier I had installed. It probably did this when I used the "immunize" feature. Anyway I copied this file into the same folder of the Win8.1 machine after renaming the original file that was there. This stopped the ads but left the space blank. The response time is probably about right now, at least there is no obvious delays and MSN has not "stopped responding" as of yet. The MSN home pages on both machines are nearly identical now. The remaining question is this -

How can I get rid of the blank spaces where the are no longer?

On my Win7 machine the stuff below the ads just slides up to fill the space. On the WIn8.1 machine the space is blank and there is still the tiny ad lines at the bottom to provide feedback(I think).

Hope this helps you!!

Thanks again in advance for you support.

Mike